Railroad Tycoon 3
Railroad Tycoon 3
Readme File - 6 October 2003
Version 1.00
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Installation
2. Starting Railroad Tycoon 3
3. System Requirements
4. Troubleshooting – General Steps
5. Troubleshooting – Specific Issues
- A. Flickery/Missing Mouse Cursor
- B. Flickering Graphics (Other than Mouse Cursor) C. Graphics too dark (At night or otherwise)
- D. Trains are invisible some of the time.
- E. Problems when MSN/AIM messages and/or e-mail arrive
- F. ATI Radeon – Blurriness, Glowing Building Fringes
- G. ATI Rage Fury Maxx
- H. 3DFX Voodoo cards
- I. S3 Savage 2000 cards
- J. Sound Skips/Stutters
7. Performance
8. On-Disk Extras
9. Technical Support
Insert CD-ROM - Disk 1 (Install) of Railroad Tycoon into your CD-ROM drive. Follow the onscreen instructions to install the game to your hard drive.
If for some reason the installation screen doesn't appear or if you have CD-ROM Autoplay disabled, double-click on 'My Computer', then locate and double-click on the icon for your CD-ROM drive. Double- click on "SETUP.EXE" (in the root of the CD) to begin the installation process.
(2) STARTING RAILROAD TYCOON 3
You must have the Railroad Tycoon 3 Disk 2 (Play) in the CD-ROM Drive to play.
Click on the Windows 'Start' Button in the bottom left corner of the screen, then select 'Programs',
'Railroad Tycoon 3', then select the 'Railroad Tycoon 3' item.
(3) SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
- OS: Windows 98/ME/2000/XP CPU: 400 MHz
- RAM: 128 MB Video Card: 16 MB 3D Disk Space: 1.2 GB
- Other: 4X CD-ROM, Mouse and Keyboard, DirectX compatible Sound card with speakers/headphones recommended
- ATI: Radeon (all versions), Rage 128, Rage Pro, Rage Fury Maxx
- Intel: 810, 845, 865 (a.k.a. 'Intel Extreme' and 'Intel 3D Direct' graphics) S3: ProSavage, S4 Savage, Savage 2000 (See Troubleshooting – 5 I) SiS: 300/305/650/651/740
- Matrox: Parhelia, G400/450/550
- PowerVR:Kyro I and II
- 3DFX: Voodoo 3, Banshee,
- Voodoo 5 5500 (See Troubleshooting – 5 H)
- 3Dlabs: Oxygen VX1/Glint R3
- Trident:Blade T16
(Direct X 8.1 or above) for it.
(4) TROUBLESHOOTING – GENERAL STEPS
If you can't run the game, we recommend the following steps:
- Reboot your computer and try again. An old solution, but still a good one...
- Try launching the game in 'safe mode'. Click on your Windows Start button, then click 'Programs', 'Railroad Tycoon 3', 'Troubleshooting', 'RT3 (Safe Mode - Windowed)' . You can also try the other versions of safe mode, if you think your sound card may be causing the problem.
- Update your video card driver.
shortcut to this tool can be found in the 'Start' menu, under 'Programs', 'Railroad Tycoon 3',
'Troubleshooting'
Then, go to the appropriate video chipset web page to download the latest drivers. They all have a button on the main page for 'support' or 'downloads'. Follow that to get and install the latest drivers.
The major vendor's sites are: NVidia: www.nvidia.com
ATI: www.ati.com
Intel: www.intel.com
SiS: www.sis.com
Matrox: www.matrox.com
PowerVR: www.powervr.com
3DFX: www.voodoofiles.com
- Update your video card/chipset BIOS. (This is the actual chip that display graphics. This is usually NOT necessary if you have a physical 3D card by ATI or NVidia, but often IS necessary if you have an on-motherboard integrated chipset, such as the Intel Extreme 3D chipset. Again, go to the manufacturer's site and look for a BIOS update patch.
- Verify that Direct3D acceleration is enabled and working correctly. Click on the Windows 'Start' button, then click on 'Run', then type dxdiag, and then click 'OK'. Click on the 'Display' tab and verify that all Direct X features are enabled and working properly.
- Check for a patch for the Railroad Tycoon 3 game itself. Go to www.gathering.com, and select the 'Downloads' tab to see if a patch is available.
- On a multiple monitor system, it is recommended that you run Railroad Tycoon 3 on the primary display.
- If you’re experiencing problems on a Windows 2000 machine and you’ve already updated your video drivers, download and install the Windows 2000 Service Pack version 2 or later.
- If the game won’t run at all, or crashes quickly within the game world, it is possible that you have the wrong AGP aperture setting for your video card. This problem will generally show up in any modern, high-end 3D game if your system has an add-in 3D video card that is configured wrong. To verify, test another modern 3D game on your machine and see if it has similar problems – if multiple 3D games crash or don’t work, you may have this problem. If so, talk to your PC maker or 3D video card maker’s tech support people for instructions in how to set your computer’s AGP aperture correctly.
- Flickery/Missing Mouse Cursor: If your mouse cursor flickers, or is not visible at all, press the ~ (tilde) key (upper left corner of your keyboard). You can also launch the game in safe mode (which will give you a black and white mouse cursor). Full mouse cursor options can be seen in the Settings window, Graphics section.
- Flickering Graphics (Other than Mouse Cursor) – If objects in the game world appear to flicker, try these steps:
• Reduce your graphics overall settings. Press <F6>, then lower 'Visual Detail' down one or more notches.
• Try running the game in windowed mode. Press <F9> to toggle to windowed mode. In particular, this resolves problems seen with Voodoo 5 5500s
• Again, ensure you have the latest BIOS and drivers for your video card. In particular, a BIOS
update has been known to resolve flickering on Matrox Parhelia cards.
- Graphics too dark (At night or otherwise) – If you're playing the game in a dark room or with a relatively dim monitor, the graphics may appear too dark and hard to see, especially at night or during storms. You can mitigate this problem in several ways:
•Brighter Nights. To increase the brightness of the world at night and during storms, press
<F6> to bring up the settings window, and under the 'Graphics' option, enable 'Brighter
Nights'
•just your monitor or room conditions. If changing the in-game options does not produce a satisfactory result, you can also increase the brightness setting on your monitor (most monitors have this option), or you can reduce the lights in the room where you're playing the game.
- Trains are invisible some of the time. When trains are waiting for something (loading/unloading cargo, at a service tower, waiting for another train to pass on the tracks), they should become translucent. The SiS integrated video chipsets, as well as a few older video cards (Notably the PowerVR Kyro 1/2) don’t support translucency, and the trains may be fully transparent (i.e. not visible). To resolve this, press <F6> for the settings window, and, under ‘Gameplay’, check off ‘Use Gray For Inactive Trains’ – the trains will be gray instead of translucent/transparent. Even on modern video cards, when multiple translucent trains are in the same area, it can cause minor flickering – if you prefer, enable the gray trains rather than translucent trains
- Problems when ‘pop up’ messages and/or e-mail arrive. If you are running RT3 full screen, you may experience interruptions if you have other applications running on your machine, including instant-messaging programs, e-mail programs and other applications that pop-up windows when something occurs or arrives. These applications may cause Windows to try to shift focus away from the game and to themselves. Generally, this is distracting but no worse. However, depending on the application in question, your version of Windows and other factors, you may be unable to return to the game correctly. In general, and especially if you have these problems, we recommend closing such applications before launching RT3. If you must run these other programs, consider running RT3 in windowed mode, which is much more conducive to switching between multiple applications. To do so, press <F6> for the settings window, then, in the ‘Graphics’ tab, uncheck the ‘Full Screen’ checkbox.
- ATI Radeon – Blurriness, Glowing Building Fringes. If improperly configured, ATI Radeon cards (especially the 9000 and above models) can experience the following visual glitches: Fringes of buildings and cars glow at night. Grid mode (press 'G' key to toggle) produces only a fuzzy unusable grid. When placing or hovering over stations, the glowing 'radius of effect' has blurry, hard to discern images. All of the aforementioned symptoms are caused when the driver ignores RT3's bilinear/anisotropic filtering preference. To resolve, do the following: At your windows desktop (NOT inside of the RT3 game), right-click on an open area of the desktop. Choose 'Properties', then click on the 'Settings' tab, then choose 'Advanced'. Click on the 'Direct3D' tab (if you do not see a 'Direct 3D' tab, then you'll need to install the ATI control panel, normally found on the disk that came with your video card, and also downloadable at www.ati.com). With the 'Direct3D' tab selected, you should see a box labeled 'Anisotropic Filtering'. Check this box, so that the application (i.e. Railroad Tycoon 3) can control this setting. Railroad Tycoon 3 uses filtering for some operations, but turns it off for others.
- ATI Rage Fury Maxx. No drivers are available for this card for Windows XP or 2000, that we know of. In Windows 98/ME, this card only runs the game in 'Windowed' mode. To launch RT3 in windowed mode, press 'Start' – 'Railroad Tycoon 3' – 'Troubleshooting' – 'Safe Mode, windowed, with sound'.
- 3DFX Voodoo cards. These cards are now quite old and the manufacturer is out of business. Nonetheless, RT3 can run on Voodoo 3 and 5 cards. Please get the latest drivers via Windows Update (if you’re running Windows XP) of from www.voodoofiles.com. If you have difficulty running the game, or experience flickering or other problems while running, you may want to run in windowed mode (launch the game by pressing 'Start' – 'Railroad Tycoon 3' – 'Troubleshooting' – 'Safe Mode, windowed, with sound'.)
- S3 Savage 2000 cards. If you experience flickering on this card, you may want to run in windowed mode (launch the game by pressing 'Start' – 'Railroad Tycoon 3' – 'Troubleshooting' – 'Safe Mode, windowed, with sound'.)
- Sound Skips/Stutters. Although sound problems are less common than video problems, they can occur. Make sure you have the latest sound drivers. If the problem persists, open the 'Settings' window in Railroad Tycoon 3 (press <F6> in the game), click on 'Sound', and try changing the 3D Sound Provider to either 'DirectSound3D Software Emulation' or ‘RAD Game Tools RSX 3D Audio’. If that doesn’t work, try this: Click on the Windows 'Start' button, then click on 'Run', then type dxdiag, and then click 'OK'. Click on the 'Sound' tab and lower the ‘Hardware Sound Acceleration Level’ slider all the way to the left (disabling sound acceleration).
(6) MULTIPLAYER GAMES
By design Railroad Tycoon 3 multiplayer games have a small delay between when an action is requested by a player and when the host will allow that action to take place. On average this delay will be about 1 second. There are two factors involved in determining the length of this delay. The first is game speed. The faster the game speed the shorter the delay. However, this places an increased demand on all the computers in the game. The default speed of ‘Normal’ offers the greatest balance between command delay and cpu processing power. The second is network latency. A poor connection between a player’s computer and the host computer will result in a longer response time for a player action. While in-game you can view the ping times of all the players in the game with hotkey <CTRL> ‘N’ (default).
Firewall/NAT Port info:
TCP ports: 9000, 6500, 6073.
In-Game Chat commands:
/kick <user name> Use this to remove a player from the game or chat lobby.
/clear Use this to clear your chat history.
/whois <user name> Use this command to display a user’s IP, game version, and CPU speed.
/ban <user ip> Use this, for the current game only, to ban an IP from joining the game.
/unban <user ip> Use this to allow a previously banned IP to join the game.
(7) PERFORMANCE
If the game runs slowly for you, there are a wide variety of settings you can adjust to make it faster. Load up a game, and press the <F6> key to view the Settings window.
Select 'Graphics'.
The easiest approach is to either:
A.Lower your video resolution. We recommend 800 x 600, or even 640 x 480 for low end machines.
or
B.Lower visual detail. Lower it one level at a time until you find a setting you like.
If you want more control over the game's appearance, speed, and visual quality, click on the '+' icon to the left of the 'Graphics' item, to expand your options. Try adjusting any of the individual settings to achieve a performance level you're happy with.
Finally, as with any other game, we recommend you close any other open applications before launching
Railroad Tycoon 3. This is particularly true if your computer only has 128MB of RAM, as Railroad Tycoon
3 requires a full 128MB of RAM for itself and the operating system, or performance will be slow with a lot of swapping to hard drive.
(8) ON-DISK EXTRAS
Your CDs include several extra programs – our way of saying thanks for picking up Railroad Tycoon 3...
A.Map Builder – This is a tool that can simplify the task of creating your own maps in Railroad Tycoon 3. It is not needed to play RT3 or even to use RT3’s map editor, but the external Map Builder tool can easily allow you to create a height map of any part of the world, for realistic mountains and coastlines. It includes a full satellite heightmap data set from U.S. government sources. Click on ‘Map Builder’ on the Autorun/Splash screen, or, install it directly from CD 1, in the ‘Map Builder’ folder. Inside the tool, select ‘Help’ for more complete information. Note that while the Map Builder excels at creating base maps with real world height and coastlines, it does
NOT create rivers, forests or cities, nor does it paint the ground in interesting colors. That’s up to you to do, within RT3’s internal map editor. On with it, then...
B.RT3 Mini-Game – Ahh... for the old days when games were simple to play (and create). Click on RT3 Mini-Game to play a simple, fun top-down, 2D train puzzle game. It runs directly from the CD, so there’s no installation involved. It takes a minute to learn, a lifetime to master (well, OK, you can probably master it in about an hour, but it’s still fun). Go ahead, try it!
C.Loco-Commotion – Yes, there are train games other than Railroad Tycoon 3. Perhaps you missed this one when it was released in 2002 (as a full, stand-alone game). It doesn’t have quite the look of RT3, but it is challenging, fun, and quite different in play mechanics from RT3. The full game is included, free. A manual for Loco-Commotion in .PDF format, can be found on disk 1, in the Loco_Commotion folder (though you can easily play the game without the manual). Enjoy!
Loco-Commotion System Requirements:
•Windows 98/Me/2000/XP
•Pentium II 266 MHz or better (Pentium III 600 MHz processor recommended)
•32 MB RAM (128 MB RAM recommended)
•400 MB free disk space
•AGP 3D video card with 8 MB RAM (DirectX 8.1 compatible)
•AGP 3D video card with hardware T&L support and 32 MB RAM (Recommended)
•DirectX 8.1 compatible sound card
•8x CD-ROM
•Microsoft compatible mouse and keyboard
D.Mall Tycoon 2, Trial Version – For the would-be tycoon whose interests range to modern empire-building (or if you just want to build your own mall without two dozen wireless phone stalls...) Mall Tycoon 2 is hitting stores right about the time Railroad Tycoon 3 does. This is the full version of Mall Tycoon 2 – the whole game is yours to try. However, unlike with Loco- Commotion and the RT3 Mini-Game, you will have to pay for this one if you want to keep it (not everything in life can be free...) The trial version grants you two free uses of the game – the whole game is playable, but you can only launch it twice. If you enjoy it, you can unlock it permanently via electronic (on-line) purchase - no trip needed back to the store. If you don’t like
it, uninstall it with no further obligation. The game’s complete manual is included as an HTML file, easily browsable/readable once you’ve installed the game. Give it a go!
Mall Tycoon 2 System Requirements:
•Windows 98/Me/XP
•Pentium III 800 MHz or better
•128 MB Dedicated RAM (256 MB Recommended)
•450 MB free hard disc space
•32 MB Direct X compatible accelerated video card
•Direct X compatible sound card
•8x CD-ROM
•Mouse
•SVGA Monitor
•DirectX 8.1a
(9) TECHNICAL SUPPORT
If you have a technical problem concerning the operation of our software, please contact our technical support representatives for assistance. In order to help our representatives assist you as efficiently as possible, please provide them with the following information:
•Computer brand and model
•Available hard drive space
•Amount of system RAM
•Video card type and amount of video RAM
•Sound card type
•CD-ROM drive type
•DirectX version
Also please provide a detailed description of the problem, including any error messages you received. Note: This information is for technical support only and representatives are unable to provide game hints
or suggestions.
Phone: (410) 933-9191
Hours:
Monday-Friday
9-5 p.m. EST.
Mail:
Take-Two Baltimore
9900 Franklin Square Drive
Suite A
Baltimore, MD 21236
E-mail: tech@take2baltimore.com
Patches and other information can be found at: www.gathering.com
Copyright 2003 Gathering. Railroad Tycoon 3, The Railroad Tycoon 3 logo, Pop Top Software and the Pop Top logos are trademarks of Pop Top Software, Inc. Gathering, the Gathering logo, Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. and the A Take-Two Company logo are trademarks of Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. All rights reserved. All other trademarks and copyrights are properties of their respective owners. Made in the USA.
